The Retail RIA Channel Report

One of the Ipreo Blog’s ongoing missions is to share content from across all areas of our business. This week, we take a closer look at Discovery Data and its Retail RIA Report.

Ipreo’s Discovery Data offers a single consolidated view of the financial services industry, including 39,000 firms and over 2 million professionals. Access to that data is provided via an annual subscription to one or more web applications including a state-of-the-art online system, programming interface (API), and secure HTTPS and FTP sites. In addition, Discovery Data is the industry leader in data hygiene services and the foremost authority in data-driven market insight.

Earlier this month saw the publication of the ‘2025 A Ten Year View – Retail RIA Channel’ report, which uses over 3 billion historical data points to assess the accelerating trend in the independently owned retail RIA channel (as compared to traditional wirehouses) with insights into what this means for investors over the next 10 years.

Compiled from research gathered for the upcoming 2015 edition of the Discovery Data Retail Financial Services Industry Almanac, the inaugural issue of which debuted last year, the Retail RIA Channel report displays evidence of a massive shift in the advisor marketplace and a doubling of the independently owned retail registered investment adviser (RIA) channel over the next 10 years alongside a traditional advisor channel that is losing market share. This translates to the RIA channel going from $2 trillion to $5 trillion AUM and from 20,000 firms to 40,000 firms while other channels are stagnant or declining…

The Retail RIA Channel report also shows that the traditional channel has experienced an overall decline in the number of advisors per firm over the last 6 years. As these traditional firms are no longer hiring and training thousands of advisors annually, there is a resulting increase in the aging of the advisor population, with advisors age 35 and under dropping by more than 30% over the past 6 years, now accounting for less than 20% of the overall advisor population.

Ipreo is not registered as a broker or dealer with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) nor is
it a member of a self-regulatory organization such as the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc.
(FINRA) or of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC). Outside of the UK, Ipreo does not
engage in any activities that will require it to register as a broker or dealer in the jurisdiction in which
such services are performed. Ipreo Limited is authorized and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority
under reference number 775369 on the Financial Services Register at
http://www.fca.org.uk/register/.